"Victorin improves, and he will improve still more with ripening years," I replied to the captain. "But what can we do—he is young—he loves pleasure—and pretty girls."
"I also love pleasure, and furiously, too!" exclaimed the good captain. "There is nothing that I delight more in, when my duties are done, than to enter my lodging and empty a pot of cool beer with my friend Eustace, while we chat over our old trade, or entertain ourselves furbishing our weapons and good armor. Those are real pleasures! And notwithstanding all the excitement that one finds in them, they are absolutely honorable. Let us hope, Schanvoch, that Victorin may some day prefer them to his immodest and diabolical orgies with the pretty girls, that scandalize us."
"I am of your opinion, captain; hope is better than despair. But in the absence of Victorin you may confer with his mother. I shall notify her of your arrival."
Saying this I left Marion alone, and passing into a neighboring apartment, encountered a serving-girl who led me to Victoria, the Mother of the Camps, my foster-sister.
CHAPTER IX.
VICTORIA THE GREAT.
I wish, my son, for your benefit and the benefit of our descendants, to trace here the portrait of that illustrious Gallic woman, one of the purest glories of our country.
I found Victoria seated beside the cradle of her grandson Victorinin, a handsome boy of two who lay profoundly asleep. Victoria had some needlework in her hands, and was busy sewing, agreeable to her custom as a good housekeeper. She was then, like myself, thirty-eight years of age, but she would have been hardly taken for thirty. In her youth she was appropriately compared to Diana, the huntress. In her mature years she was no less appropriately compared to the antique Minerva. Tall, well built, and virile, without thereby forfeiting the chaste graces of womanhood, she was magnificently shaped. Her beautiful face, instinct with a grave yet gentle expression, bore the impress of majesty under the crown of black hair which she wore in two braids coiled over her august forehead. Sent when still a little girl to a college of our venerated female druids, and having taken at the age of fifteen the mysterious vows that bound her indissolubly to the sacred religion of our fathers, she ever since, and although married, preserved the black garb of the female druids, which was also the habitual garb of the matrons of old Gaul. Her long wide sleeves, open up to the elbows, exposed a pair of arms as white and as strong as those of the valiant Gallic women, who, as you will see in our family narratives, my son, heroically fought the Romans at the battle of Vannes under the eyes of our grandmother Margarid, and preferred death to the disgraces of slavery.
In the middle of the chamber, and not far from the seat occupied by the Mother of the Camps near her grandson's cradle, several rolls of parchment, together with all that was necessary for writing, lay upon a table. From the wall hung the two casques and swords of Victoria's father and husband, both killed in the same battle. One of the two casques was surmounted by the Gallic cock of gilt bronze, with his wings partly spread, and holding under his feet a lark that he menaced with his beak. The emblem was adopted by Victoria's father as a military ornament after a heroic combat in which, at the head of only a handful of men, he exterminated a Roman legion that bore a lark on its ensign. Under the weapons stood a little brass vase in which seven twigs of mistletoe were arranged. Gaul, you must remember, my son, reconquered her religious liberty in recovering her independence. Close to the brass vase and the twigs of mistletoe, a druid symbol, was a wooden cross, in commemoration of the death of Jesus of Nazareth, for whom the Mother of the Camps, without being a Christian, professed profound admiration. She looked upon him as one of the sages who shed luster upon humanity.
Such, my son, was Victoria the Great, the illustrious Gallic woman whose name our descendants will ever pronounce with pride.
When the Mother of the Camps saw me come in, she rose quickly and approached me with gladness, saying in her sonorous and sweet voice: